Many potential uses of high temperature superconductors require high quality superconducting surfaces on structures of complex shape and large size. Uses of such superconducting coatings include magnetic shielding structures, microwave cavities, waveguide bandpass filters, electrically small antennas, and interconnects in phased array antenna systems. Therefore, commercial success of superconductors may depend on the discovery and perfection of efficient methods of producing high quality superconducting films and coatings.
Because of the highly anisotropic conductivity and short coherence length of superconducting oxides, effective superconduction in the high frequency systems mentioned above requires dense, highly oriented crystalline surfaces. Conventional ceramic processing techniques, however, have not produced materials with the high quality surfaces required by these systems. Furthermore, superconducting wires will not satisfy these needs even if successful production techniques are developed. Thus, there is a need for a simple and effective technique for depositing dense, high quality, oriented crystalline films and coatings of high temperature superconducting oxides on substrates of large size and arbitrary shape.